I searched for the poem that I remembered, oddly, vaguely, from my first year of teaching at HTHS. It was Nancy Ellis, in my senior English class, who wanted to use that poem for her required essay analysis. That class was a marvelous one—the students were all seniors and, while they were not, technically, the High Honors group (I don’t think we had AP in those days), they must have been on the immediate rung below.
The poem, as I remember, as I can see us, Nancy and me sitting at a cafeteria table with our Sound and Sense books, trying together to understand it, had the word “fictive” in it. That was what I was in search of – the poem of a memory that had the word fictive.
My search was last week, when I was at Pam’s, at Cape Cod, the two of us, as we always did, critiquing each other’s writing. I had a collection of short stories that I was calling My Life, Fictively, a word that the few people I’ve mentioned the title to, say “What does that mean?”
To me, it’s obvious. Actually, it was to Nancy Ellis, too. Fictive, fiction. Made up.
Oddly enough, sitting in that wonderful room in Pam’s house that is “mine” each summer, pondering the poem, I suddenly recalled the writer’s name: Wallace Stevens. Could that be it? I looked it up. Stevens wrote a poem called “To a High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” a poem of some density, that references “fiction” in the first line: “Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame,” and then again at the end: “Fictive things wink as they will. . . . “
Where did all those memory signals come from? How did Nancy Ellis, a senior in high school, begin to untangle the poem’s meaning? She did. We did. It was odd for me to re-read the poem, difficult to decipher even all these years later. Wallace Stevens, I could see, had written the poems about Blackbirds – which Bruce owned. Bruce followed all poets. Bruce died a few years ago, and this devotion to poetry he realized late in life, although he always read. What I do remember about reading Wallace Stevens is that he was difficult to understand; he required work. He would have appealed to Bruce.
Why was I on this odd project? I wanted a pithy quote for the beginning of my book—something that would announce, in the title, that the stories were somewhat true (“a life”) but not entirely (“fictively”). But I could see, as I held the Stevens poem up to the light, that it was too complicated in its sentence structure to lift a meaningful phrase from.
Still: I like the poem, and I was impressed with myself that I found it.
As for Nancy Ellis—who knows? She did graduate from college as an English major and actually returned to the high school and became my colleague in the English Department. I remained at that high school for the next sixteen years, but I’m not clear on what happened to Nancy, how long she taught there, or other details, other than, right now, as I think about her, remember also that she was pretty.
So: even reconsidering Nancy and Wallace Stevens and a life that I, as a young woman, shared with Nancy – not that many years between us—I realize that it’s another life I’m presenting somewhat “fictively.”